


Clothes Maketh The Cyborg

by violentdarlings



Series: piece by piece [1]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Post-Movie: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Shopping Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-15
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-12-30 04:14:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12100485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentdarlings/pseuds/violentdarlings
Summary: Peter takes Nebula clothing shopping.That's literally it.





	Clothes Maketh The Cyborg

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know.

It’s Quill who does something about it first. He pauses in the middle of breakfast, spoon dangling comically from his mouth - not that Nebula has anything approaching a sense of humour, of course, but still, she notices. “It’s your look!” he announces to the table at large, which consists of Rocket (still half-asleep), small Groot (still completely asleep), Nebula herself, Quill, and Drax.

“There appears to be nothing amiss with Nebula’s eyesight,” Drax says, after peering at Nebula’s face for an uncomfortably long moment. “What are you trying to say, friend Quill?” Quill is spluttering. The spoon falls.

“Not the things she looks with, her look!” he insists. Rocket wakes with a start.

“Huh?” he asks, and gropes for his coffee cup. Nebula rolls her eyes to the ceiling. _Idiots_. “Hey, I saw that, blue girl.”

“I fail to see what my look has to do with why you’re spraying cereal over the table, Quill,” Nebula says evenly. Quill, who is almost impossible to insult, is too busy beaming.

“Yeah, whatever,” he says, and clicks his earpiece on. “Gamora? Have we passed Osmone yet? No? Awesome. How long? Tomorrow. Okay. Set course.”

“Osmone,” Rocket says in disgust. “You can’t be serious.”

“I do not know this planet,” Drax says.

“I am Groot!” Nebula forces her face to remain neutral as the small plant child climbs down off Rocket’s shoulder and deposits himself in her lap. He holds his arms up insistently.

“No, tree,” Nebula tries to tell him, but his black-button eyes blink sadly.

“I am Groot!” he says, his voice loud and incredibly shrill. Even Drax winces.

“Fine, fine,” Nebula mutters, and scoops him up to curl against her chest. Once there, Groot offers up a beatific smile, like he hadn’t been seconds away from a baby tree tantrum before she acceded to him. “Fiend,” she mutters, and Groot snuggles his face against her leather vest.

It is not adorable. It is not.

“Osmone?” Rocket is still arguing. “What the hell do we need from there?”

Quill is smiling in an odd, secretive way. It makes him appear foolish. Nebula does not see whatever appeal that Gamora does. “I have a plan,” he says.

“Better be more than twelve percent this time,” Rocket mutters into his coffee.

“I am Groot,” Groot says. Nebula has no idea what he’s saying, or why Rocket doesn’t want to go to Osmone, or even what kind of planet Osmone is.

She just wanted breakfast, damn it.

The next morning, she wakes to a hammering on her door. “Nebula!” Quill is hollering through the metal. “We’ve just set down on Osmone! Be in the cargo bay in fifteen minutes! Big day planned!” She can hear him clomping off in the other direction.

Nebula is far too well-trained to groan, throw her arm over her eyes and go back to sleep, but she does entertain the idea of doing so for one brief, blissful moment. Then she swings her legs out of bed and begins to dress.

She expects to see the whole crew, or at least part of it, when she gets to the cargo bay – but it’s only Quill, in his long leather coat sprawled out on the floor wrestling with his boots. It’s not uncommon to see Quill half-dressed, but it never fails to be irritating.

“All right, then. Come on,” he says, and bounds down the ramp out onto Osmone. Nebula, fists clenched, follows.

At first Osmone doesn’t look so different from most planets. Then again, the Quadrant has landed on the outskirts of aa large city, and as they enter Nebula becomes more and more unsettled. The city seems to be little more than glass windows as far as the eye can see, although as she gets closer she can see doors in between the glass. The glass themselves hold an array of colours that hurt Nebula’s eyes; she has never seen so many –

“You brought me clothes shopping?” she asks in pure disbelief. Quill, keeping easy pace at her side, grins broadly; his lips have been twitching since they left the ship. Clearly he thinks this is a treat. “Why?” Nebula sniffs sharply, but she cannot detect an odour. “Do I smell?”

Quill laughs. “No, Nebs, you’re fine.”

“Do not call me that,” Nebula warns. “You do not call Gamora ‘Gams’.” Quill shudders.

“And I never will,” he says, before adding hastily: “Not that you’re less terrifying than Gamora! Far from it, in fact –” He breaks off; it must be clear from her expression that Nebula is less than impressed. “You don’t smell,” he says more quietly. “I just thought you might like a change.”

And just like that, all the fight drains out of Nebula. He thought. She might like. A change. “No one has ever considered what I might like before,” she says slowly. “I – _we_ were not allowed personal possessions, when I was young.” Quill smiles, and if it had pity in it Nebula would dismember him, but there is only that warm, Terran sympathy that seems to come so easily to Quill.

“I know,” he says, and brushes his elbow up against her flesh one.

“I would not even know where to start,” Nebula hedges. Quill’s smile this time is entirely shameless.

“Trust me,” he says, leading the way down the street. “I know way more about girls’ clothing than I probably should. I will be your guide.”

It’s still early, so there are not many other customers about, but the shops are open. The first place Quill takes her appears to be a shop full of spacewear; pilots’ suits, equipment, even the leathers that Ravagers favour. Nebula was not expecting ribbons and lace, but still, she had hoped, just for a moment –

No, she had not. Foolishness.

“Good morning!” Quill says exuberantly, greeting the saleswoman. Nebula glares.

“Dispense with the niceties,” she mutters, but Quill blithely ignores her. Nebula waits through the pleasantries impatiently, eyeing the clothes around her.

Finally, when the humanoid woman stops cooing over Quill, he gets to the point. “My friend here –” he says, indicating Nebula with a sweep of his hand, “needs something durable, but with good range of movement. Our line of work is a bit… rough and tumble.” He winks, and the saleswoman nearly swoons, and Nebula only narrowly avoids throwing up.

Still, they leave the shop with a bag full of clothes. Two jumpsuits like the one she wears now, for everyday work; a matching jacket and skirt that Quill had said made her look fierce. Nebula could not recall the last time she’s worn a skirt. A pair of leather trousers that had made Quill do a brief but distinct double-take at her ass, and a long coat a bit like Quill’s, but a dark purple to be almost black. Nebula could not stop touching it, the softness, the choice. It had been dizzying.

Quill had paid. “Today is about you!” he’d insisted. “It’s on me. Well, technically it’s on the Nova Corps. It’s the last of what they paid us for saving the galaxy that first time. Been saving it for a rainy day.”

Nebula had not argued, but only because she had not known what to say.

“Are we done yet?” she asks as they leave. Quill arches an eyebrow.

“Done?” he echoes, in a voice that suggests she is speaking blasphemy. Do Terrans even have a religion, she wonders. “Certainly not. That was the work stuff.” He smirks. “Now we do the fun stuff.”

By the end of the day, Quill is staggering under the sheer weight of the bags. “Good day,” he moans as he collapses onto the floor of the cargo bay, bags spread all around him. “Really good day.”

Nebula stares at the array of coloured bags around him. “What do we do with them now?” she asks, thinking perhaps they will be given to her as she earns them. It is what Thanos would have done, if he had even allowed her anything kind at all. Quill peers up at them.

“Now you take them to your room and pick out something to wear for dinner.” Nebula blinks.

“Just take them,” she repeats. “And I can have them all at once? They’re mine?”

There is a dreadful sadness in Quill’s eyes. He gets up, leaving the bags on the floor, and very gently sets his hands on Nebula’s forearms, just enough to hold her in place without being threatening. “Of course they are, Nebs,” he says very gently, like she might break if he speaks too loud. “They’re all yours. You can wear them anytime.” He bends, and scoops up the bags, grunting again at the weight. “Come on. Let’s take them to your room.”

Quill leaves her at the door to her quarters, with a reminder that the evening meal is in an hour. Nebula sits down on her bed and looks at the bags for a while. Eventually she has the nerve to open one.

The fabric that flows out is a deep green, almost the colour of her sister’s skin, and absurdly soft. Nebula stands, shakes out the garment; it is a dress, the first she can ever remember owning. Nebula would have walked past the dress shop in derision, but Quill had hustled her inside, had waited while she tried on the ridiculous thing. He’d looked at her with wide eyed awe when she’d walked out in it, uncomfortable as hell but fighting down pleasure at the softness on her skin, and said, “Oh, _hell yes_ , Nebs.”

Nebula sets the dress down carefully, and opens another.

“I don’t need this nonsense,” she’d said at once. Quill had smirked, and had picked out about fifteen things for her to try on in the first five minutes. “My… augments make all of this unnecessary –”

“Nebula, every girl should have at least one decent set of lingerie.” But she’d flatly refused to model them for him despite his leer, had threatened to remove at least one of his vital organs, and in the end Quill had bought her five sets of the stuff.

Nebula is stripping off her jumpsuit and putting one on before she can think better of it. She looks in the mirror on the back of the door, and for a moment barely recognises herself. Oh, there’s the blue skin and the black eyes and all the pieces Thanos implanted in her, but there’s also a slim figure in a white bra and panties edged with lace, almost shockingly white against the cobalt of her skin.

It does look good, and it is more comfortable than the band she usually wears around her breasts to keep them from chafing against her jumpsuit. Still. She shouldn’t like this, shouldn’t want pretty things. It’s a weakness.

Nebula tears through the rest of the bags, tugs on the leather trousers and a soft sleeveless shirt, and is sitting down to dinner before she realises she hasn’t taken off the lingerie. She really ought to head back and take it off, but Drax and Rocket are coming in arguing, and Gamora is setting down a plate in front of her with a brief, swift hand on Nebula’s metal shoulder, and dinner smells good.

Quill sits down beside her with a thunk. “Hey, team? Good day?”

Nebula sits quietly and eats her meal. She doesn’t often contribute to the conversation, mainly because so many of the other Guardians never shut their damn mouths.

She’s almost finished when she feels a light tap on her arm. Nebs,” Quill whispers, just for her. “Your strap.” Nebula looks down. She hadn’t adjusted the straps of the bra, and one has fallen down her arm.

She fixes it rapidly, and does not thank Quill, but all the same, Nebula goes to sleep that night in her new sleeping clothes, with the deep blue scarf Quill had picked out for her on her pillow, so she can rub the softness of it over her augmented cheek and eyelid.

She doesn’t dream, not that she can remember, but when she wakes up she is content all the same.


End file.
